US Government Sets Up Online "App Store" 138
krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."
So once the gov't depends on these companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
...they'll be too important to fail?
The Term 'App Store' is Becoming Over Used (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Term 'App Store' is Becoming Over Used (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. This seems to be more of an official non-classified download repository than anything else. If I were in a small business and called their samba share that had the install images of Office, Acrobat, and other licensed packages for internal use an "app store", I'd be looked at by their IT people like I was some troll or pirate.
To me, a true "app store" is something like Apple's offering, Handango, Digital River, or a place where one looks through a catalog and either downloads a demo, or pays a license fee, then gets an executable to download.
There are some things I'd like to see the USG do though, if they are offering a large repository like this for internal use. The first thing is to PGP or gpg sign everything on the store so if it gets tampered with, one can find the app that has no or an invalid signature. (I'd also like to see Authenticode signing on Windows installs, and gpg package signing on BSD/RedHat/debian as another method that is transparent to the user, but will alert them if something is not right.)
How is this going to help.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How is this going to help.. (Score:4, Insightful)
But it really is transparent as in you can't see it (mostly because its not there).
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
haha.. can you say - security breach?
i trust google more than i trust the lowest bidder for a government contract.
Re:The bigger question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh.
So - do you think Canada, Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Australia, and Britian, to name a few, are the equivalent to or worse than Hitler's Nazi Germany?
Personally, I think you're just ignorant of both recent and long-term history. Fortunatly, that can be cured by education, if you're willing to make the effort. You seem ignorant of both Nazi history, as well as the histories of nations in general, especially those called 'socialist' by those who don't know what the word means.
I understand that you believe the ideals you hold, but I don't think you've ever examined them. I hope you're willing to educate yourself, someday - you seem like an intelligent person, but you're missing quite a few (objective, verifiable) facts as to the reality of the world you life in.
Re:The bigger question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the assumption that you're uneducated is a fair charge. I don't even know where to begin, except maybe to suggest you should read an actual history book, probably starting with the definition of important terms. Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left - but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something. By the way, the actual socialists came in the time after Nazi Germany - so comparing Obama to Honnecker would probably make more sense for the charges you are making, which are incidentally also complete bullshit.
I'm sorry, I don't normally go for ad hominem attacks like this, but I'm a German (so please excuse my English) and I feel very strongly about people getting their facts right as opposed to the mindless parroting of hopelessly corrupt historical fiction.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
This has been done for DECADES (Score:4, Insightful)
People who are shaking at the knees about google and the federal government obviously are not aware that the government has been outsourcing data processing to offsite contractors for decades.
Sheesh. Google is no different than ANY other contractor when it comes to the Federal government and has to abide by the same contracting rules as everybody else.
Does this mean that it's any SAFER than at EDS, Booze Allen, Perot Systems, HP, IBM, etc? No. But it's not any less either.
Re:Cloud services (Score:4, Insightful)
Go to the .gov app store, click on your fav. representative, and send them your issue and PayPal contribution.
Sounds much easier to me!!
Re:Cloud services (Score:2, Insightful)
He's got to be shitting himself now that people are finally starting to wake up to who and what ACORN is and how deeply in bed with them he is..
No. We'll just keep calling all opposition racists.
It doesn't matter what is said, if it is not pro-Obama it must be deeply rooted in racism.
To link this to the +4 grandparent post and make it on-topic: that is why they had to admonish (misspelled on purpose) Joe Wilson. I don't remember anyone being admonished last year for booing Bush while he was speaking in front of congress during the state of the union.
Re:Cloud services (Score:3, Insightful)